Microsoft OneNote

A few of the May 2016 patches Microsoft Office caught our eye with embarrassing bug fixes, previously not disclosed to customers. They all apply to older Office releases: Office 2016 and before. It’s a long-standing Microsoft trick to hide embarrassing bugs from customers until they have a fix. In the meantime, customers waste time and […]

Office 365 for Windows has new look privacy settings, hidden deep in the menus where, presumably, Microsoft hopes customers won’t find them. These changes are in conjunction with the renamed Office cloud features now called ‘Connected Experiences’. They apply to Office 365 for Windows build 1904 and later. A series of opening screens may appear […]

Office 365 customers will be seeing a set of opening screens about how Microsoft gathers and uses customer data. Those screens are carefully worded to avoid some hard truths about modern cloud connections and cover Microsoft from legal liability. Cloud features can be great and very useful. Companies do their best to hide the problems, […]

The May 2019 update to Windows 10 includes a long-awaited and important addition, an updated Emoji Panel. What a pity that it totally sucks and is incredibly dumb. Emoji Panel is better than what we had before (nothing) but not by a lot. We’re talking about the Emoji Panel or ‘keyboard’ which appears in Windows […]

Type the Trademark ™ TM symbol into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac. Trademark ™ TM symbol is, strictly speaking, called the Unregistered Trademark symbol. Its counterpart is the Registered Trademark ® Trademark in Word and Outlook The Trademark ™ sign has an inbuilt shortcut in […]

Many OneNote users would like to save their notebooks on their computer and not OneDrive. Saving a notebook to a local folder is possible. It might become impossible in the years ahead. OneNote 2016 for Windows supports saving a notebook to any folder. OneDrive is the only notebook option in other OneNote apps (including OneNote […]

It’s the Chinese Year of the Pig and there are some symbols in Word, Excel and PowerPoint to mark the occasion in Office for Windows or Mac. The Unicode standard has three Pig related emoji, Pig, Pig Face and Pig Nose. Once you know the names or hex value, they can be found with the […]

It’s been five years since the Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other Office icons were given a new look. Now they’ve been announced and, frankly, we could not care less. New look icons don’t make any difference to anyone’s daily use of Office. It’s like supermarket groceries that boast ‘New Packaging’ as if any customers care? […]

Microsoft has added the Dictation feature to the browser based versions of Word and OneNote. You can speak and words will appear in Word/OneNote using the cloud ‘speech to text’ feature. Source: Microsoft Dictation is already available in Word 365 for Windows. Office for Mac users have a ‘voice to text’ feature available in the […]

Microsoft includes a OneNote logo in a lot of Office 2019 promotion but that’s a stretch because there’s no ‘OneNote 2019’ included. Down in the fine print: “OneNote for Windows 10”. That’s the OneNote app which is available to all. OneNote desktop has already been dropped from the Office lineup. Replaced by the Windows 10 […]

Microsoft has announced some truly important improvements in what you get with Office 365 Home, Personal and University plans. The Home plan will be available for six family members instead of five. How Microsoft calculates use of Office software is changing and for the better. All these changes apply from 1 October 2018 onwards for […]

Here’s what we know about the Office 2019 for Windows. There’s a matching page about Office 2019 for Mac. Before you get too excited Do NOT buy Office 2019 if you have Office 365 like Office 365 Home, Office 365 Personal or an enterprise plan. In other words, you pay for Office as an annual fee. […]

Microsoft seems to be moving towards a name change for ‘Office 2016’. They haven’t announced anything directly, but their documentation is changing for Windows and perhaps Office for Mac as well. If you’re confused, don’t feel bad because Redmond isn’t making it easy. They are moving gradually towards naming Microsoft Office as a service instead […]

Here’s how to make a custom ribbon tab in Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook and how Microsoft has left customers shortchanged for the last decade. We’ve already talked about customizing the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT) for certain documents. You can make the QAT adapt according to the document you’ve opened. Alas, that’s not possible […]

When you first go into Teams it’s a confusing jungle of terms and options. As usual, Microsoft assumes we’ve all been born knowing how their software is arranged. It’s not as difficult as it looks … once you get the structure or logic of Microsoft Teams. Wrap your head around Microsoft Teams with this article […]

How to type the Per Thousand (or it’s official name ‘Per Mille’) sign ‰ into Microsoft Word, Excel or PowerPoint. Per Thousand / Per Mille sign codes Decimal: 8240 Hex: 2030 Use the Hex code in Word as a shortcut to enter any symbol. The Hex code lets you find the Per Thousand/Per Mille symbol […]

A new Office ‘Garage’ option is ‘Student Tools’ an extra ribbon featuring the tools Microsoft thinks are most appropriate for students. It’s only available to students in USA, Australia or New Zealand for Office 365 for Windows or Office 2016 ProPlus. Word Student Tool Garage is where Microsoft tries out plug-ins and features. Dictation started […]

Office Online is a slimmed down version of Word for Windows or Mac. What’s possible in a browser interface is impressive from a technical point of view but it will never compete with Word for Windows or even Word for Mac. Anyone familiar with Office for Mac or Windows should be able to use the […]

Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote are always available for you, even if the main Office for Window/Mac are broken or missing. Office Online is the alternative that you have as a standby when regular Office fails or isn’t available. As long as you have a browser and decent Internet connection, you can use Word Online, […]

As usual, Microsoft has released non-security updates and bug fixes for Office 2016 and Office 2013 on the first Tuesday of the month. A few caught our eye: Late last year, Microsoft was caught out leaving a horribly vulnerable Equation Editor in Office for 17 years. A new patch restores the MT Extra font so […]

Sharepoint hosted by Microsoft Office 365 continues to get more features with a few indicating changes coming to broader Office products. Changed Opening Pane The Office.com pane is changing with a ‘Recommended’ section that lists items that Microsoft’s Artificial Intelligence thinks you should see. Discover shows documents other staff are working on, including new documents […]

In an entirely predictable move, Microsoft is dropping the full OneNote desktop program from their lineup. OneNote 2016 for Windows, the traditional Windows program is being killed. It’ll be a slow death but it’ll still be dead. OneNote 2016 for Windows will be supported with security patches until October 2025 but will get no new […]

Microsoft has previewed new Office features targeted at students and teaches, however many are good for the wider public too. For example, Dictation is coming to Word for Windows, Word Online, PowerPoint for Windows, Outlook Desktop, OneNote Windows 10, and OneNote Online with support for at least nine languages. Source: Microsoft It’s being hyped as […]

Microsoft has released Office apps that work on Chromebooks, the low cost laptops using Google’s Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote apps are now available for most, if not all, Chrome OS users. There seems to be some teething troubles with the Office apps and the Google Play store. Redmond hasn’t exactly shouted about this extension […]

Ever since Microsoft added shared, collaborative documents via OneDrive, they’ve had problems with saving and sign-in. Here’s how to deal with some of those persistent bugs. These bugs can happen in Word, Excel, PowerPoint or OneNote. Most commonly with documents saved to OneDrive but also Dropbox or other cloud storage. Can’t Sign-in A very common […]

The Microsoft Pix app has been updated to include more automatic ways to fix photos. Photos of documents magically look like they were scanned in. It’s a ‘Garage’ project, supposedly for trial software and technologies. These days ‘Garage’ projects are presented in a more professional manner and promoted a lot more, blurring the line between […]

Microsoft has released another version of Office 2016 for Windows to be tested by insiders. This one is bought and installed from the Windows 10 Store. Naturally Office-Watch.com dived in to check it out. At the moment, only some Windows Insiders and users of Windows 10S can get Office in the Windows Store. Later this […]

The Office 365 version of Word 2016 for Windows has some nice improvements to LatTex support. LaTeX is the maths boffins preferred way of writing formula in computer code for conversion into the symbols that confuse us mere humans. In Word 2016 (Windows, Office 365 users only), you can see some extras on the Equation […]

Microsoft Office can read aloud, talk or speak the text of documents to you. It’s possible in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote. Computer speaking text is mainly suggested for various disabled users under the ‘Accessibility’ name. But ‘Speak’ is also useful if you’re just tired of reading the screen or are proof-reading from another […]

Microsoft’s annual giveaway of ebooks is on again. Thousands of free downloads, including Office related ebooks. The full list is on the Microsoft blog. We’ve copied the Microsoft Office related titles into a easily searchable list below. Most are in PDF format with a few in MOBI (Kindle), EPUB or XPS format. Modesty (almost) […]

Microsoft proudly added accessibility features to Office 2016 for Windows, in particular ‘Alt Text’. Pity it’s not been refined and fixed once the hype died down. Earlier this year, Microsoft added an ‘Alt Text’ feature to Office which tries to automatically suggest alternative text for visually impaired readers. Right click on an image and choose […]

Images inserted into your Word documents are being automatically uploaded to Microsoft for the accessibility ‘Alt Text’ feature. Even if the image and document are saved on your computer, not cloud storage. It’s a hidden ‘feature’ in Office 2016 for Windows desktop (Office 365 subscribers). Earlier this year, Microsoft added an ‘Alt Text’ feature to […]

No cloud service is perfect, what should you do to prepare for a temporary or permanent breakdown of your OneDrive or Office 365 cloud storage? Microsoft pushes use of OneDrive to store all your documents and images. That suits Microsoft’s strategy but isn’t necessarily a good thing for customers. Office 365 occasionally goes ‘off the […]

Get Microsoft Office for no money, nil, ziltch, nada, bugger all. It’s legal, easy and this article explains the many options available. We’ve not talking about ‘Office wannabes’ but Word, Excel, PowerPoint or OneNote from Microsoft itself. They won’t have all the features of Office 2016 for Windows desktop. There’s usually enough for most purposes […]

It’s expected that today (15 June 2017), Microsoft will release ‘Office in the Windows Store’ as a new way to buy Office. Understand the differences between it and ‘Office 2016 for Windows’ or the Windows 10 / Modern apps for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. The new release is not just a different way to […]

For a long time, it’s been possible to ‘print’ from any program and put the result directly into OneNote desktop program. Now you can ‘print’ to the OneNote for Windows 10 app. Once the ‘printed’ pages are in OneNote, they’ll get a text version added in the background. You’ll need the separate Send to OneNote […]

Microsoft’s promotion of a new OneNote for Windows 10 feature is, to put it politely, misleading. The updated app doesn’t do what the hype promises. You can’t insert a meeting from ‘Outlook’ and not ‘Outlook 2016’ as Microsoft alleges. Hype vs Reality is something all Microsoft customers are familiar with, but this goes beyond some […]

Coming soon is a new version of Windows, the Windows 10S. What does it mean for Microsoft Office users? The 10S is a stripped down and limited version of Windows 10. Some advanced features aren’t available while others are set to Microsoft’s preferences automatically. To buy 10S is cheaper than the Home or Pro editions, […]